Coaching vs. Therapy: Frontiers and Fences

Part of the struggle to get people to embrace change is that many of the methods to facilitate change are contrary to how the mind and brain work.  Additionally, despite being presented with ample evidence of how change will be beneficial, many people don’t make changes even when they know it’s in their own best interest. 

Coaching and therapy differ in their approach to change in some fundamental ways of addressing the person, the problem, and the process. 

Contributions from psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and quantum physics provide the foundation to coaching. Systematic change to integrate new behavior—as part of a new identity—reprograms mind software and rewires brain hardware.

Overlapping Influences

Contributions from Psychology and Psychoanalysis

• Empathy:  The listening position from inside the client’s experience; the subjective reality of how the client thinks, feels, processes, attributes meaning

• Neutrality:  Remaining equidistant from a client’s dilemma, conflict, or ambivalence—not taking sides, but allowing the client to resolve the dichotomy

• Confidentiality:  The necessary guarantee of a foundation of trust

• Process:  Collaborative, contingent conversations

• Unconscious beliefs:  Assumptions and beliefs ghostwrite current behavior

• Self-regulation:  Regulating states of mind and managing emotion are crucial success strategies

• Self-statement:  A unique, personal communication of experience and point of view; all that you say is about yourself.

• States of Mind:  Psychophysiological (mind-body) states—analogous to software programs—that determine how we perceive and process information, and how we respond.

• Transference:  The active organizing process of the mind to understand a present experience, but necessarily relying on existing software.

Contributions from Neuroscience

• A focus on recurring problems further etches existing circuitry. 

• A focus on solutions creates new neuronal networks and pathways.

• A focus on awareness of choice is more beneficial than understanding the source of thoughts. 

• Our perceptions and self-talk alter the connections and pathways in the brain.

• Our brain connections form metal maps of reality; what we expect shapes what we experience.

• Unfamiliar or unsolicited advice will be met with resistance, as it sets off the brain’s error detection response.

• New insights and adaptations occur through balanced learning: left (intellectual) brain + right (emotional) brain. 

• A moment of insight (an “ah-ha” experience) activates parts of the brain on fMRI scan, accessing a state of mind that is more creative and integrative; when someone is given information, a directive, or a fact, no part of the brain lights up.  

• Mirror neurons illuminate how we experience others through our sensory resonance.

Contributions from Quantum Psychics

• We each generate energy frequencies in emotions and thoughts that become the source of what and who we attract, as well as the basis of our sense of well-being. 

• In addition to our individual energy field, we interact with the collective field of energy of others (Einstein’s Unified Theory).

• The mental act of attention activates and holds in place brain circuitry (Quantum Zeno Effect); with consistent focus and repetition, these chemical links become stable changes and the brain rewires.

• We do not attract what we want, but we attract what we focus on.  Our unconscious doesn’t register + or –.  Just the focus.

Broad Lines of Distinction

A therapist may be likened to an archeologist, and a coach to an architect. 

Traditional psychotherapy endeavors to explore and work through emotional problems, to come to the end of an old story in order to move fully to the present.  Psychotherapy inherited western medicine’s definition of health as an absence of disease, so it bears the stigma of being associated with problems and sickness. 

Distinctions between therapy/counseling and professional coaching include:
• Fixing problems vs. co-creating possibilities
• Recovering vs. discovering
• Personal expert vs. colleague
• Ending the old story vs. co-creating a new story
• Trauma and healing vs. goals and succeeding
• Health care provider vs. accountability provider

The Coach as Catalyst for Change

An emphasis on illness and problems in therapy moves to a focus on possibilities and solutions in coaching.  Clients come to coaches when they feel there is something more. 

Underlying causes are always present for any problem—often complex, multi-determined causes. A coaching approach is to use causes, feelings, and history as information to focus on now and plan for next.  At times, simply doing what is currently effective dissolves barriers. 

Coaches are choice architects who help the client make this moment’s choice fully conscious, considered, informed, and strategic. While professional coaching meets needs that people have always had, it also offers a new delivery system for mentorship, accountability, partnership, co-creative work, and a sense of possibility. Guiding the development and actualization of new behaviors combined with conceptualizing the mental map—the internal model—facilitates a new level of mastery.

As a Professional Coach who formerly practiced, taught, and contributed to the literature of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis for over two decades, it makes a great deal of difference to move from scouting for problems to co-creating possibilities. 

A Professional Coach should know how, why, and when to refer a client to a psychotherapist, just a therapist should know how, why, and when to refer a client to a Coach. 

As we further define and clearly articulate our professional identities as coaches, therapists will better learn how to use coaches as colleagues. Both professions have a lot to offer clients and to each other.

Insight, understanding, even coming to the end of the past and its old story are important. But they’re not enough. You have to be in a new story before you can give up the old one.  Coaching is about writing and living a new story.